We've just had a small adventure with Spiceworks scans. We're running SW 6.2.00905 on our central server and all remote collectors. We had a Dell Vostro with Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on it that had been scanned into SW inventory a while back and was recently wiped and redeployed by Alex.M990 with a different NetBIOS name, etc. The laptop in question had the remote agent installed on it, had been scanned into SW inventory, and when we setup the agent we associated that laptop with a particular site name (DaveCo).

Flash forward to post-wipe times. Alex wiped the laptop, put it on our domain (having Win 7 Pro 64-bit on it again), and was working on scanning this new build into inventory. But this time we did not put the remote agent on the device and tried scanning with the central server only. He did several tests from the Network Scan Settings page once he had made sure the firewall was configured properly, and all came with a pass. So the new build should have scanned into SW inventory, right?

He had no such luck. I remember him telling me the tests had passed and that he could not scan the device by ip or DNS name and get it to scan into SW inventory (despite all tests showing as passed from the Network Scan Settings page). He tried giving the device a static ip rather than using DHCP with no luck, and he event went so far as to install the remote agent on the new build to see what happened, which still didn't scan the device into SW inventory.

I happened to be over where that laptop was sitting and did some digging. I noticed the scan would get to "expanding network list item" but never classify the device as a laptop or fill in details. I dug into the logs a bit more and found the shallow scan was successful, which told me the Dell service tag. I looked up the service tag in inventory, and the inventory object I found was the one that existed in inventory before we wiped the laptop.

Here's the kicker...once I deleted the inventory object for that laptop (which was what was created by the agent hat was on it before we wiped it), I was able to scan the newly built laptop into SW inventory and have all details filled in as you would expect to happen.

Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out why this happened. And no, I was not smart enough to save the log files from trying to scan the new build but not seeing it in SW inventory. Does this have something to do with the fact that the laptop pre-wipe was scanned into inventory with the agent and tied to a site name vs. the new build being scanned by the central server only? All agents for any laptop we have with the agent installed are reporting to the central server.

I'd love to hear anyone's theories as to why we could not get the new build to scan into SW as a new inventory object.

I'd like to preface this with this is just a theory, without logs to look at I'm only guessing.

Spiceworks marks Remote Agents differently in the database. It won't scan them for the same reason it won't scan a remote collector. The installation of Spiceworks on the machine (Agent) should be sending the data back to the server via a specific method the application looks for.

So with the application still thinking the serial number of the device was an agent, it saw it and skipped scanning it, since it thought the agent should be reporting it. Once you deleted the old image (agent) from inventory, Spiceworks stopped associating the device's serial number with an agent, and could scan it again.

With the MAC address being the same, shouldn't SW update the name of the device in inventory as well as the software installed, etc.? Even though a new inventory device was not added, I would think at minimum the existing inventory device would be updated with information from the new build.

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II believe it depends on your scanning settings. If you are doing a full scan it may read the new information. If you are doing incremental it may not. I have not tested it with our spiceworks. We do full scans all the time.

I'd like to preface this with this is just a theory, without logs to look at I'm only guessing.

Spiceworks marks Remote Agents differently in the database. It won't scan them for the same reason it won't scan a remote collector. The installation of Spiceworks on the machine (Agent) should be sending the data back to the server via a specific method the application looks for.

So with the application still thinking the serial number of the device was an agent, it saw it and skipped scanning it, since it thought the agent should be reporting it. Once you deleted the old image (agent) from inventory, Spiceworks stopped associating the device's serial number with an agent, and could scan it again.

Again, just a theory.

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